"Interracial democracy has become - at least for analysts
of contemporary public opinion - a threat to the validity of survey evidence."

forthcoming, University of Chicago Press, 2005

Lynn M. Sanders, Department of Politics, University of Virginia

check back here for book-related links to:

WPA data files (coded from Library of Congress files)

WPA analysis files

files for constructing pooled NES dataset

files for analyzing pooled NES dataset

links to "Negro Digest" images

book synopsis:

INTERRACIAL OPINION IN A DIVIDED DEMOCRACY

Lynn M. Sanders

In the wake of the civil rights movement, the configuration of American
public life changed dramatically. New things could be said and not said
about racial politics in public. Blacks could speak more freely, while whites
sensed new inhibitions. Egalitarian norms structured discourse more; racist
utterances were tolerated less. My book shows how American public opinion
surveyors responded to these new norms of public discourse about race.

Oddly enough, while integration advanced, public opinion researchers held,
more than ever, to segregationist assumptions about what Americans could
say and not say in public. Today, blacks are still expected to defer in
speech before whites, and whites are thought to be newly fearful of being
called racist. Citizens are supposed to mask their true preferences about
controversial racial issues like affirmative action.

In the framework of these assumptions, it seems necessary to isolate citizens
of different races from each other in order to get them to say what they
really think about racial issues. Or at least, this is the way that most
researchers approach the problem of apprehending public opinion today.

Thus, one clear integrationist ambition - the possibility of sincere political
exchange between citizens of different races - is decidedly repressed in
contemporary political survey research. This despite the fact that public
opinion research is today coming under diverse "public pressures": public
opinion researchers want variously to claim that surveys mirror democratic
deliberation, that they are a form of political participation, that they
reflect utterances shaped by exposure to media messages or other "contextual
effects" rather than singular, underlying "true attitudes" about politics.

Yet racial integration does not count for surveyors as a legitimate public
pressure. Public opinion researchers today are strikingly unwilling to see
the "public pressure" brought to bear by fellow citizens - especially citizens
of different races - as a reasonable influence on political thinking.

Even the briefest encounter with any text considering the problem of "social
desirability" or "race of interviewer" effects in survey research will indisputably
bear this claim out. In part because fellow citizens - especially when they
are a different race - might carry into the survey measurement context some
of the new normative pressures associated with race in the post civil rights
era, their influence is assumed to bias, distort, damage, or even ruin survey
data altogether.

Interracial democracy has become - at least for analysts of contemporary
public opinion - a threat to the validity of survey evidence.

In no small measure due to the remarkable democratic ambitions of public
opinion surveyors ("we who conduct public opinion research do so because
we see it as part of the solution to the dilemmas posed by democratic theory,"
says one), this is a problem. Where democratic theorists think "the very
procedure of articulating a view in public imposes a certain reflexivity
on individual preferences and opinions," public opinion researchers declare
"as long as people know they are being asked to express their beliefs and
feelings about race, the investigator cannot dismiss the possibility of
desirability effects - people giving an insincere, "right" answer."

How did this come to pass? What can we do about it? My book answers both
questions. The skepticism public opinion researchers exhibit today about
the authenticity of interracial political exchange is rooted in a conceptual
framework and measurement strategy that I call "privatization." Through
my reading of history, including some secondary analyses but mostly first-hand
accounts of how surveying figured in American racial politics from the Founding
to the present day, I show why privatization made sense during segregation
and how the approach was consolidated during the Second World War.

Yet, quite against the assumptions that privatization reflects, I also
show that African Americans sought out opportunities to engage in interracial
discourse even during segregation and even when such engagements had to
be considered far more dangerous than they are now. This longer historical
tradition of African Americans finding a "right to survey" joins contemporary
"public pressures" in surveying to demand that public opinion researchers
must move beyond the privatization of - and racial segregation in - political
research.

No grand intervention - nothing like a deliberative poll, for example -
is required for public opinion researchers to come to see interracial opinion
as politically meaningful rather than useless data. It requires only a methodological
shift. Surveying itself, when conducted with interviewers, provides a democratically
defensible and analytically tenable way to represent and understand what
happens when Americans of different races talk about politics with each
other.

My book invokes democratic and liberal theory to defend this argument.
It utilizes contemporary public opinion survey data to show how public opinion
looks when interracial engagements are treated as authentic rather than
biased. And it argues, on the more practical side of the methodological
shift, that surveyors should be in the business of making it easier to see
interracial public opinion data, by providing fuller information on interviewers,
by randomly assigning them to interviews, perhaps even randomly selecting
them along with respondents.

Turning back to the deep roots of surveying in American political history,
I claim that the methodological shift I advance would recognize, as those
who claimed a "right to survey" did, that all of the roles involved in surveying,
including the role of interviewer, are political roles. This means that
surveying should be evaluated according to the liberal democratic standards
we embrace and utilize elsewhere in our politics.

Today, democratic and scientific public opinion surveying requires racially
integrated survey interviews, where American citizens encounter and express
political views before others who are racially different from them as well
as the same. What emerges through such encounters is not a mistake but is
instead a reflection of the best integrationist ambitions of American liberal
democracy.